History Lessons #2 : Music

Ahhh, music. Personally, the one thing that sticks to mind the most about a game, beside the story for RPGs, is the music. Ever since I got access to the internet, one of my interests was finding music from my games. But there is an evolution behind it too, believe it or not.

Let's go back in time, in the 80s. If you checked my first history lesson, you already know about the Coleco. While I haven't done any tribunes for other systems, they did have common elements on that side.

The first generation of video game music was limited if any at all. Most of the games had a little jingle for the opening screen. For example, almost everyone remembers Pac-Man. Yet, does anyone remember that the game itself had no background music?

Wether it was because the evolution was not there yet, or simply because of technical limitations on those systems at the time, most games had little to no background music. Popeye and Burgertime for example did have a little 'bip boop' rhythm in the back. With nowaday's standars would be simply nothing else than a heart beat to check if the user is still paying attention to the game. Back then, it's all you had.

The only time you had actual music of any sort was during powerups. Pac-Man and Popeye had such power modes, accompanied by a little music that would die off when done. It would be the sole indication of such powered mode most of the time, outside of slight screen color changes.


The first generation of gaming systems also had one severe technical limitation to work around, which was the sound samples. In pretty much every case, they had samples pre-defined and hard-coded into the console itself. The cartdriges held no other data than what note to play on what rhythm.

This system also existed in the first computers. At first it was simply a single beep, but then it evolved into something similar to the consoles, being able to modulate the samples into something that becomes a melody. That system was called MIDI, which also was a standard for electronic organs/pianos. The MIDI system used samples that were on the computer/organ that played it.

When I started on the Internet nearly 10 years ago, there was something called XGMidi (I think), which was a MIDI player that contained it's own set of samples, rather than using the ones from the computer itself. The difference was surprising.

Nowadays most computers come with much better MIDI samples, and most sound cards have options to pick different qualities and sets of samples as well. But that also means that two computers won't run the same MIDI music exactly the same. Some MIDI songs actually sounded horrible on XGMidi, yet were perfect on normal MIDI, and sometimes they were better on XGMidi. It depends on the samples and their modulation. Sometimes it doesn't follow what the author inteded for it.

But up until the NES/MasterSystem, the principle was the same. And the impossibility of changing those samples made sure that everyone would hear the same music. There was only a handful of games that used exterior sound samples. Two examples I remember from the NES was Smash TV (Good luck! You'll need it!) and Star Wars (Luke! Use the Force!). The sound quality was horrendous and ear-splitting though, but that's the best you had.

I'll expand more next time, but before ending I'll leave you with two sound samples that you can download. For fault of having better examples, here's the battle music from Final Fantasy (the first).

First the MP3 format so you hear how it was out of your TV. Then two samples of the same song in MIDI. Since MIDIs are usually done by fans, it won't exactly sound the same, but you can note the difference in the instruments used. Out of the two samples, depending on your computer, one will probably sound better than the other.

FF1-Battle MP3
FF1-Battle MIDI 01
FF1-Battle MIDI 02

PS : I prefer the first MIDI to the second ;)

History Lesson #1 : ColecoVision

Out of the many subjects I intend to eventually blog about, one of them got some amount of interest by a few users on GameFAQs, which I hope to find in the comments later as well. The evolution of gaming, from a player's point of view.

My little history started when I was around 5 years old, my parents bought a ColecoVision. That was pretty much the base of video gaming :

-The controllers were made with with an analog joystick (kinda, the games didn't really respond analog-like like PSX/PS2 though), two buttons (that were one and the same for controls) and a numeric keypad that main use was to select the amount of players and difficulty. In certain games it could be used in different manners, but for the most part it was never used.

-The console itself was bulky and square. It even had slots to insert the two controllers into them. Since the controllers were about as big as two packs of cigarettes put side by side, you can imagine the size of the entire thing.



For a first generation console, it made alot of ingenious things thought. There was a trackball add on for certain games, that also put to use two buttons instead of only one. The trackball was truly analog compared to the other controllers, yet I only know of one game that used that feature. The game was called Slither, which was more or less a Galaga-style of play, except you could shoot up or down

While the trackball unit hooked to the controller ports of the main unit, it was about as big as the main console itself and had it's own controller slots since you were using the main unit's. Problem is, they never thought about making them stack or fit together to look cool or even save space, so it was a mess of wires.

Aditionally there was an Atari-converter, which basically allowed you to play Atari games on your Coleco, the first backward compatbility feature ever. Although it was completly different as Atari was actually a competitor at the time, and even tried legal actions. But in my 5-8 years old mind, I thought it was cool and asked my parents for an Atari AFTER the Coleco, thinking it was the better system. In reality, Atari was just a notch under Coleco powerwise.

Gamewise, it came with the old time classic of Donkey Kong, but we owned many many games for it, such as Donkey Kong Jr, Gorf (space shooter that I adored), Ladybug, Pacman, Zipper (Hitchcock music O_o), Smurfs and many more. There was only two styles of play at the time :

-Tiny characters on huge grounds : Spelunker or Donkey Kong fits that style where you can see the entire area at a glance.

-Bigger characters with screen switching : Smurfs for example.

This system defined linearity. At this stage in gaming, if you weren't stuck on a single screen, you had only one direction to go : to the right of the screen. Controls were as simple as they ca be with a single button press.

The only exception to this was the awesome Baseball game, that was using the special Action controller. It was much larger than the original controller, the keypad was smaller, and it was held like a handle instead. Your 4 fingers would hit 4 different buttons placed like triggers inside the unit, which was mostly hidden of view on purpose. The top near the keypad had two small wheels to control vertical and horizontal.

In practice, the baseball game would be played like this with that controller : The four trigger buttons were hidden so you wouldn't show your opponent what kind of ball you're be throwing. A mix of the directional handle and the 4 buttons would control the ball in 100s of different manners, although all that was really affected in this limited perspective was height and speed, which was still better than many NES baseball games in all truth.

The 4 buttons would also control which base you'd be throwing the ball to, or which fielder you'd be controlling. You'd keep the button pressed to move the fielder to catch the ball and press the button again to throw it to another base. The wheels would control the runners on base, pressing a button would dictate them to 'run to that base', so pressing the second button would force all of them to run to second base.

It was very complex, and ahead of it's time considering that 4 buttons joysticks were not used until the SNES afterwards. The ColecoVision was a pioneer on that side, although the popularity of console gaming did not lift up ina major way until the NES. Atari also arguably had a much bigger success at the time and a firm hold on the market for several years.

This concludes the first part of this little history lesson.